Quite Random

Extend me baby!

One of the main reasons, if not the main reason that Firefox is the best web browser there is is the ability to add extensions to do extra things, groovy little add-ons that are free and while not exactly being life-changing things, at least make web browsing easier. Here are the ones I use:

• I’ve changed blogging tools and am now using ScribeFire, which rocks incredibly. Highly recommended, a great way to quickly and seamlessly update as many blogs as you like.
• Forecastfox gives you constantly updated weather reports in the little status area at the bottom of your browser window.
• Foxmarks synchronises your bookmarks and passwords between browsers so you can keep the same set of bookmarks on more than one computer and not have to remember your passwords wherever you go.
• Adblock Plus blocks banner ads on web pages and can also be used to block other images or flash content that you might find irritating. It is possible to browse the web without all those irritating adverts blinking at you.
• Google Redesigned makes Gmail and Google Calendar look seriously good.
• IE Tab gets around any problems with not being able to view web sites in Firefox by opening up Internet Explorer within the Firefox window in a new tab.
• Delicious Bookmarks allows for faster bookmarking and sharing of interesting content around the web (sign up with Delicious as well).
• Cooliris turns photos into beautiful 3D galleries, and works with Flickr, Facebook and several other photo (and video) sites.
• Remember the Milk for Gmail adds brilliant task management to Gmail (sign up with Remember the Milk).
• Read It Later creates a temporary list of bookmarks for items that you just want to read later, not necessarily keep.
• DownThemAll! is a great download manager and accelerator built right into Firefox.
• Speed Dial creates a funky wall of thumbnails of your favourite sites for quick clicking when you open a new tab.
• FoxyTunes is a brilliant remote control for your PC media player so you can skip tracks or even find lyrics and bios, all from a small toolbar in the browser.

And for web development it’s well worth having ColorZilla, TinyURL Creator, Firebug and Web Developer.

As for chat and email/Facebook notifications, it’s well worth giving Digsby a try. It rolls together checking of your Gmail, Hotmail and other accounts, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn notifications, and MSN/Yahoo/Google/AOL/ICQ/Facebook chat all in one app.

Weekend project

Old computers can end up becoming little better than oversized paperweights - an old desktop in my room needs to be wiped and then given to a recycling company, and I’m now on my third laptop. I had been waiting for a while to try out Ubuntu, a Linux-based operating system which provides a free, open source alternative to Microsoft Windows. Windows is a necessary evil for me and most people, it’s what normally comes on new computers, all wrapped up and preinstalled with a bunch of mediocre applications whether you like it or not, and everyone uses it so it’s what everyone ends up using.

After seeing some impressive examples of Ubuntu running on YouTube videos, and with the recent arrival of version 8.04, dubbed Hardy Heron (Ubuntu releases are given cool alliterative names - previous versions have been called things like Gusty Gibbon and Dapper Drake), I decided to install it onto a laptop that, while a few years old and way too heavy to carry around the place, still has some guts. It was simple enough - I downloaded the installation files from Ubuntu.com which I then burnt to a CD, and just put the CD in my laptop. Then I restarted the laptop and Ubuntu ran from the CD to show me what it was like. The CD let me install Ubuntu alongside Windows so I can boot my laptop up into Ubuntu or Windows, and managed the process of splitting the hard drive up. One reboot and it was installed.

And Ubuntu is beautiful. A simple, uncluttered desktop, highly customisable, and some graphical features that make Windows (even Vista) look pathetically clunking in comparison. Below is my new Ubuntu desktop, with Firefox 3 open:

The clock on the top right shows the weather and pulls appointments from Google Calendar, the top left menus give links to applications, files and settings, and the dock at the bottom allows me to launch my favourite programs quickly. When I grab a window to move it, it flaps gently as if made of paper or silk. I have four desktops and swap between them by rotating them around a cube, so I can split up email, web browsing, web editing and word processing and don’t have a clutter of windows.

And this all works fine on a five year old laptop (try getting Vista to work on a five year old laptop) - and it’s free. All of it. The operating system, word processor, spreadsheet, image editors, all of it. If you want to install something new you just open up a program, search for what you want, it downloads and installs, and that’s it. The office software, Open Office, opens and saves Microsoft formats and can output to PDF. Firefox extensions run the same on Ubuntu as anywhere else. Ubuntu can browse and open files from Windows file systems.

OK, it hasn’t been completely simple. Getting some stuff to work has still involved searching Google, some command-line tweaking, but the basics are easy, and so far it has been much, much more enjoyable to use than Windows. I’d definitely recommend making a weekend project out of setting up Ubuntu and giving it a go. Maybe a weekend when it’s raining.

Speaking Freely

“I’ve been trying out this new service called SpinVox and it’s something that Steven Frye just blogged(?) about on his blog. It’s quite incredible. You basically speak into the phone and some sort of voice recognition software works out the saying and turns it into text. It’s really quite impressive. So I blame another reason for me procrastinating and not getting my college work done on Steven Frye this time anyway.”

spoken through SpinVox

The text above was automatically transcribed by Spinvox, a new service which (so they say) uses speech recognition technology to turn words spoken over the phone into text. After it did that it automatically posted the text to this blog. As you can see it hasn’t spelt Stephen Fry’s name perfectly, and the question mark after ‘blogged’ means that it didn’t know the word so transcribed it phonetically. Nevertheless, other than trimming off three words of waffle at the end of the post above (the block above is about the maximum it will let you record), I haven’t touched it all, so it really is quite impressive.

Blogging is only a secondary application of Spinvox - my mobile phone’s voicemail now uses it, so when I get a voicemail it is sent to me as a text message a few minutes later.